


Dream

by Shearmouth



Series: Whumptober 2019 [3]
Category: Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gen, Hugs, Hurt Peter Parker, Hurt/Comfort, Irondad, Not Canon Compliant, Post-Endgame, whumptober2019
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-04
Updated: 2019-10-04
Packaged: 2020-11-23 06:30:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20887646
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shearmouth/pseuds/Shearmouth
Summary: Whumptober Day 3– Delirium"No don't..don't...don't take him too."





	Dream

Tony had finally gotten good at sleeping again.

It was a skill he had thought he may never reclaim. After Afghanistan, the Mandarin, _Thanos_– not to mention a certain six-year-old– the ability to drop off and actually rest had eluded him for years. Yet somehow in the year and a half since everything happened, since everyone had come back, he’d begun to really sleep again. Maybe it was the chronic pain from the prosthetic arm that he was still working out the kinks with, or just the knowledge that for once the world wasn’t imminently ending. Whatever. Pepper could laugh at him for waking up with drool on his pillow for the first time since Obama’s first election.

He still had nightmares though. And he happened to be in the middle of one when the alert came through over F.R.I.D.A.Y’s intercom, so it took Tony a second to wake up.

Pepper stirred next to him, murmuring. Tony blinked the sand out of his eyes and sat up in bed. He glanced at the clock. It wasn’t even ass o’clock in the morning yet– the day had yet to form a corpus. Tony rubbed his face to wake himself up just as F.R.I.D.A.Y said, “_Incoming call from Peter, boss.” _

Alarm shot through Tony. This wasn’t an abnormal feeling concerning Peter– the kid was giving him more gray hairs than Morgan– but the time of night meant he was on patrol. And Peter calling from patrol was never a great sign.

“Has Karen activated any codes recently?” Tony asked urgently. He felt Pepper tense next to him as she woke up and tuned in.

“_No, sir. The call is from Peter’s mobile phone. Should I put him through?” _

Tony frowned in confusion. “He’s calling from his cell? Yeah, answer him, Fri.”

Pepper sat up next to him, her warmth pressing against his side and chasing some of the chill out of his torso where the metal arm fused with his shoulder. “It’s almost four,” she said, sounding troubled. “He’s off patrol by one on school nights.”

Tony nodded absently. He was listening to the silence as F.R.I.D.A.Y transferred into Peter’s call. And then the soft, slightly shaky, distinctly _not Peter_ voice on the other end that answered, “Hello? Tony?”

Alarm, threatening to become full-blown panic, tightened on Tony’s throat. “Yes. Who is this? How did you get this number? How did you get that _phone?” _

“Tony, Tony, it’s MJ,” Pepper cut in. “It’s MJ.”

“MJ? What’s wrong?” Tony asked. Distantly Tony registered that in his groggy, anxious state, he had somehow failed to recognize Peter’s girlfriend over the phone. “Are you– is Peter all right? What’s wrong?”

“No, he’s not, he’s, he’s–” MJ stammered. The panic in Tony’s guts would tighter– he’d known MJ for months now, and he’d never seen or heard her as anything other than sleekly poised. She sounded disturbingly rattled now, struggling to get her words out. “He’s– something’s wrong. We were studying, and he’s been feeling weird all day, but all of a sudden he– he just passed out on the floor, and he keeps thrashing and crying and–and I can’t wake him up, and he told me to call this number if something like this ever happened, and–and–please, Tony, what do I do?”

For a split-second, Tony couldn’t speak.

_Peter. Peter. _

Pepper gripped his bicep with a bruising, grounding force. “MJ,” she said, “don’t try to touch him, he could seriously hurt you. Watch him and try to move anything hard out of his way. I’ll be there in five minutes.”

“Okay,” MJ said, sounding a little steadier, and hung up.

As one, Tony and Pepper surged out of bed and split up. Tony headed straight for the medical bay as Pepper went for the Armory to suit up.

In the haze of panic that Tony was doing his damndest to hold at bay, he realized that they got lucky on this one. Peter rarely got hurt on patrol, but when he did it tended to be catastrophic. When Tony, Pepper and Morgan were upstate, as they were almost every weekend, an injury would trigger a flurry of frantic phone calls to Bruce, Dr. Cho, Rhodey, and pretty much everyone else in the are who could catch the kid while Tony rushed south. At least this was a weeknight.

“F.R.I.D.A.Y,” Tony yelled, “alert Dr. Cho’s team.” F.R.I.D.A.Y acknowledged, and Tony tuned out the rest of the input around him as he skidded into the med bay and started prepping.

Peter had been hurt enough at this point that Tony at least had some idea what to expect. It also helped that Dr. Cho and Bruce had given him a pretty intensive rundown on how to deal with imminently life-threatening injuries in Peter’s case long enough to keep him alive until Dr. Cho’s team arrived. Tony had only had to triage Peter once, during his first semester at NYU, after he’d gotten shot through the femoral artery with an armor-piercing bullet during a robbery bust. The bleeding was bad enough that it outran his healing, and Peter almost went into heart failure right there under Tony’s hands. It scared him so badly that during and right after he healed, Tony could barely let the kid out of his sight. They introduced Morgan to the entire _Lord of the Rings_ saga and Star Wars that week, in part so Peter could recover fully, but mostly so Tony could keep an eye on him and get his own anxiety under control.

This one sounded just as ugly, if MJ’s description and panic were anything to go by.

Tony prepped the theater, warding off his increasingly catastrophic thoughts. He bit his lip in frustration. It should be him going to get the kid, damn it. But it would be a while yet before he got his arm completely calibrated, much less ready to work inside the suit. He had to trust Pepper with this, like he did with everything else.

“_Ms. Potts is inbound, boss,” _F.R.I.D.A.Y reported. “_Dr. Cho and her team are twelve minutes out.” _

“Roger that,” Tony replied. “Open the bay doors.”

The wide rolling doors in the side of the medical bay slid open, letting in cool night air. They’d had enough airborne emergency deliveries over the years with the Avengers that a while back Tony had installed the bay doors. He looked out into the orange-tinted city night to see the quick glow of Pepper’s suit drawing rapidly nearer. Tony backed up away from the doors.

A moment later, the roar of the thrusters reached him, and Pepper flew through the open doors and hovered over the landing pad. In her arms was Peter. Even from here Tony could see how frighteningly pale he was. Tony’s stomach dropped.

Pepper’s faceplate lifted as the bay doors shut behind her. She strode quickly to the nearest gurney and laid Peter out on it. Tony hurried over.

“Peter,” Tony muttered, resting his hand on the side of Peter’s face. “What the hell, kid?”

Peter shifted at the touch, moaning something close to words, but didn’t open his eyes.

“F.R.I.D.A.Y, vitals,” Pepper barked.

“_Vitals are unstable, but Peter’s pulse is currently 198, respirations 80, and temperature 106.8.”_

Tony felt himself blanch. “A hundred and _six?” _he gasped.

The doors to the med bay slid open. Helen Cho and five other doctors on her team strode in. Relief crashed through Tony.

Dr. Cho immediately strode up to the table, pulling on a scrub jacket mid-stride, and turned to Tony as her team went to work. “What’s the story, Tony?”

“His girlfriend called us,” Tony replied, hating the tremor in his voice, “she said Peter collapsed and started thrashing. She couldn’t get him out of it.”

A shout came from the table. Tony whirled around to see Peter surge upright, eyes open and staring into space. He seemed to be reaching for something, hands clawing at the empty air, and his face was twisted with fear. “No, don’t– don’t!” Peter shrieks. “Don’t– don’t go, no, don’t, don’t–“

His eyes rolled back in his head, and he went limp. Two doctors caught him and lowered him back down, and Tony forced down the nausea that surged in his guts.

Dr. Cho looked at him firmly. “Tony, Pepper, we’ve got him,” she said. “We need the room. Go.”

Tony nodded. He managed to pull his eyes from Peter and follow Pepper out into the dark hallway, Peter’s desperate cries still burning into his mind.

()()()

Half an hour in, Morgan woke up, and Pepper left Tony at the couch outside the med bay to go put her back to sleep.

Forty minutes in, F.R.I.D.A.Y announced that MJ was at the door. Knowing far better than to fight her on anything concerning Peter, Tony let her in. She joined him on the couch, and they sat silently together as they had before. Waiting. Waiting for him. Pepper rejoined them shortly after.

It was two hours in, and the dawn light was starting to creep in when Dr. Cho finally came out of the room.

Tony bit his lip again, the same raw spot he’d been worrying for hours now, as Dr. Cho stood before them, and let out a sigh.

“Peter’s going to be fine,” she said. “We found a fresh gunshot wound on his calf. It was just a graze, he probably didn’t even notice it, but the bullet was laced with a toxin that for some reason his healing couldn’t fight. It’s given him a very high fever, higher than a normal human could survive, in fact. But we have him on some medications that have enough oomph to stick in his system and help him heal. He’ll be out of it for at least a few hours, but he should be back to his old self within a day or two.”

Relief cascaded through Tony, strong enough to make the breath he released come out a little shaky. “Thank God. Thanks so much, Doc.”

Dr. Cho smiled warmly at them. “Of course. Anything for your kiddos, Tony.”

Dr. Cho explained what to do– basically they just had to let the drugs run their course and look out for anything new before they did– but Peter was stable. They thanked her again, and she and her team disbanded.

The sun was coming through the windows of the med bay and making the space seem a little more gentle when Tony, Pepper and MJ came in to sit at Peter’s bedside. Peter looked a little less pale, but his skin was still sheened with sweat, and he twitched and shifted feverishly under the thin bedsheet. Tony flinched at the visceral anger and fear that the sight of an unconscious Peter had always brought him. His heart twinged with a familiar regret– that Peter, a bright, brilliant eighteen-year-old with his whole life before him had to deal with the life of an enhanced human in a scary world.

Tony pulled a chair up and took Peter’s hand. He felt the strength in the kid’s fingers.

A bright, brilliant eighteen-year-old enhanced human who Tony would kill and die for.

Peter’s eyes slid open. They were fever-bright and sightless. “No,” he moaned. “Please, please…don’t. Don’t. Don’t go. Don’t…don’t take him too.”

Tony lowered his head, tightened his grip, and waited.

By the end of the day, Peter was lucid. By nightfall he was steady enough to migrate to the couch in the living room, despite Pepper and Tony’s reservations about his leaving the med bay. “If I need to lie around some more, I can at least watch that documentary on black holes with Morgan,” Peter protested, and it didn’t take much for Tony to yield. The evening devolved into a movie night, with the Netflix queue loading again and again and four orders of pizza steadily disappearing.

They were in the middle of another space documentary when Tony looked up and realized that he was a solo audience. Morgan had fallen asleep in her mother’s arms. Pepper was snoozing with her head against the couch cushion, and MJ was curled against Peter’s thigh, her face relaxed in sleep. Tony’s gaze tracked up, and he realized that Peter, bundled up to his chest in blankets, was awake. Awake and looking at him. There was a strange emotion in the kid’s face, bright and sharp, and Tony handled it gently lest he cut either of them.

“What is it, Pete?” Tony asked gently. He reached across the couch cushion and rested his hand against Peter’s shoulder.

Peter’s throat worked. He looked down at his hands, clenched tight together on the soft material of the blanket. “When I was sick,” he said, “I was dreaming. I know it wasn’t real, but… I saw it again. With Thanos.”

Tony’s heart clenched.

“I saw it like it was, except…you died this time,” Peter continued, not meeting Tony’s eyes. “You didn’t survive using the glove. I saw it over and over.”

_Oh, Peter. _Tony heard again what Peter had cried– _Don’t take him too. _

Tony tugged on Peter’s blanket. “C’mere, kid.”

Peter sniffled and shifted so he was leaning against Tony. Tony leaned back, pressing his flesh-and-bone arm against Peter’s and pulling Peter in so his head was on Tony’s shoulder. Peter let out a huge breath and relaxed against Tony.

“I know this doesn’t always help,” Tony murmured. “But I’m right here, kid.” He settled against Peter again, pulled the blanket over both of them. “And you’re stuck with me.”

Peter laughed wetly against Tony’s shoulder. “Okay,” he said. “I’m okay with that.”

It had been a long day. They ended up falling asleep like that.

And with his family all around him, Tony slept without nightmares.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!


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